Wednesday, June 4, 2008

I have quite a few blogs on my Google Reader, even beyond all the WOW blogs I read. One that I check out from time to time is Indexed by Jessica Hagy. The geekiness in me enjoys it because she graphs out real life situations or examples on little index cards. She's had them published into a book as well! Anyways, the other day she had an interesting one up on her site here.

There was some debate on her site whether she drew it right or wrong. I sorta think that the higher your expectations, the greater the setbacks, but I can understand the other side of the argument as well. It kind of got me thinking about expectations and their relationship to setbacks as it relates to raiding.

Jess and I haven't given much Kara raiding updates in a while. Well we sort of had a setback a while back when we lost our second healer, and we are still searching for a permanent replacement. We've run with a number of outside healers, but I know we'd love to find one who will join the guild. Then add to that we've taken some weeks off due to holidays and people being away. But last weekend we went back and we are still having trouble with Shade. Again its not the flame wreath or the blizzard or the arcane explosion... its the damn elementals that get the squishies. The only time we have taken Shade down was the one time we had a warlock with us. Oh and we had a tier 6 geared mage with us too. It really sucks that one class becomes so essential to a fight.

I wonder if our expectations became too high given that we blew through the first five bosses. So with higher expectations... the greater the setback? What do you guys think about this relationship? As a guild though, our current focus is on increasing our dps. Some of our folks are seriously deadly while others may need to make some small adjustments.

I guess we have this ongoing joke about our distate with Shade. In the spirit of another blog, Passive Aggressive Notes, here is the note I have left on Shade's door:

Dear Shade:
I know you think you are badass. But we all know that you are just a girly little lonely man stuck in a library. I am so sick of hearing you cry "Torment me no more!" or "I want this nightmare to be over!". Come on, help me help you. Please just go down already.

It's been very frustrating for us because we very quickly worked through the content up to shade, but we've been stuck on him for some time. However not having a warlock at our gear/skill level is perhaps a serious issue.

If it wasn't for the shortcut you get to the library after killing Shade I would have us skipping him altogether. We really need that shortcut though if we are going to work on the other bosses in "upper" Karazhan.

Worth remembering if you've hunters or warlocks about is that the pets can move during flame wreath. I think - gah, my memory's bad so I could be wrong - that so long as you don't do anything more than petattack [target] that it won't set off the wreath.

pets dont set off flame wreath. also if you interupt the eles they wont melee. pretty much all CC works on them (traps dont cuz they are water ele and its a water based spell) so as a priest i would always fear 1. my guild found it best to take 1 or 2 down then ignore the others.